Cadborosaurus

The sound came first. On the first day of October 1933 a Victoria barrister, Major W. H. Langley, was sailing with his wife off Chatham Island, where the water of Haro Strait runs cold and fast past the southern tip of Vancouver Island. Something grunted, close by and loud. They turned and saw a back break the surface, huge, dark green, and notched along the top like the edge of a saw. Then it went under, and the sea closed over the place.

Langley knew what a whale looked like, and he said this was not one. His word carried weight in a small provincial capital, and the Victoria Daily Times printed the story. A second witness came forward almost at once. F. W. Kemp, who worked at the Provincial Archives, said that the summer before he had sat on a Chatham Island beach with his wife and son and watched a reptile of enormous length, sixty feet or more by his guess, with a notched tail and something like a mane of kelp on its neck. It moved, he said, the way a crocodile does.

The paper’s news editor, Archie Wills, saw what he had. He ran the accounts, asked for more, and invited readers to name the beast. Some of the offers were homely and some were learned. One reader wanted to call it Amy. Another put forward a Chinook Jargon word for a great water snake. The winner arrived in a letter and took its first half from Cadboro Bay, the sheltered curve of shoreline nearest the sightings. Cadborosaurus was in print by the middle of the month, and within days the town had cut it down to Caddy.

The timing matters. Earlier that same year a Scottish lake had produced a monster of its own, and newspapers around the world were full of Loch Ness. Victoria now had one too. It was a newspaper story before it was anything else.

Reports kept coming, and over the decades they built up a rough portrait. The animal is long and thin, like a snake drawn out to the length of a fishing boat or more. Its body rises in a line of humps or coils that flex up and down, not side to side. A long neck lifts a head that witnesses have likened to a horse, a camel, a giraffe, a sheep, a seal and a dog, which is a wide range for one face. Some add a pair of small flippers at the front and a broad fan-shaped tail at the back. Supporters count more than three hundred sightings across two centuries, from Alaska down to California, with the thickest cluster in the inlets and straits of British Columbia.

Twice in the record there seemed to be a body. In the summer of 1937, at the Naden Harbour whaling station in the islands now called Haida Gwaii, workers cutting up a sperm whale pulled something strange from its stomach. It was dark, slender and close to four metres long, with a blunt boxy head and a ragged tail. The station’s supervisor and its first-aid man laid it out on a table, hung a white sheet behind it, and took three photographs amid the reek of rendered blubber. Samples went south to the provincial museum, where the director, Francis Kermode, judged the thing to be an unborn baleen whale. After that the remains vanish. No bone, tooth or scrap of skin survives.

The photographs do, and in 1995 they became the foundation of a bold claim. Edward Bousfield, a retired chief zoologist of the Canadian Museum of Nature, and Paul LeBlond, an oceanographer at the University of British Columbia, published a formal description of a new species and called it Cadborosaurus willsi, in honour of the editor who had launched it. They argued that Caddy was a real reptile and a living relative of the plesiosaurs, the long-necked sea reptiles that died out with the dinosaurs. That is the only origin story the creature has ever been given. Before 1933 there is no Cadborosaurus to explain.

Other scientists were not persuaded. A species normally needs a specimen, and three old photographs are not one. The palaeontologist Darren Naish, who has studied the case closely, thinks the Naden Harbour carcass was most likely a rotted sturgeon, or possibly a shark. He also points out that the eyewitness reports do not match each other, and read less like one animal seen many times than like many different things seen once each. A sinuous beast that bends up and down looks nothing like a plesiosaur in any case.

The second body was alive. In 1968 a man named W. Hagelund said he had netted a baby Caddy near De Courcy Island, kept it overnight in a bucket of seawater, and let it go out of pity. A study published in 2011 compared his description with known local fish and concluded that he had probably caught a bay pipefish, a thin relative of the seahorse.

Caddy’s supporters have also reached further back, to the sea serpents carved, painted and sung about by First Nations peoples of the coast, such as the Hiyitl’iik of the Nuu-chah-nulth. Those beings have their own names, powers and meanings, and they were not waiting for a newspaper to christen them. Folding them into Cadborosaurus tells nothing about either.

What Caddy does best is get away. It surfaces without warning, shows a neck or a few humps for a minute or two, and is gone before a camera is ready. It asks nothing of anyone, sinks no boats and takes no swimmers. That gentleness has made it a mascot more than a menace, and the affection for it on the coast is real.

Its weakness is the same as its talent. It never leaves anything behind. Every carcass put forward as a Cadborosaurus has turned into something ordinary on inspection: basking sharks, whales, an elephant seal, and in one 1936 case a heap of kelp and beach rubbish arranged into a shape. A film shot in an Alaskan bay in 2009 shows something moving in the water and settles nothing. After more than ninety years of looking there is still no specimen.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Cadborosaurus?

Cadborosaurus, nicknamed Caddy, is a sea serpent said to live off the Pacific coast of North America, mainly in the waters of British Columbia. It is a cryptid, an animal that people report seeing but that has never been proven to exist. It was named in 1933 by the Victoria Daily Times after Cadboro Bay in Victoria.

What does Cadborosaurus look like?

Witnesses describe Cadborosaurus as a long, thin, snake-like animal whose body rises in humps or coils that bend up and down. It has a long neck and a head most often compared to a horse or a camel. Some reports add small front flippers and a fan-shaped tail.

How did Cadborosaurus get its name?

Cadborosaurus was named in October 1933 after two Victoria residents, Major W. H. Langley and F. W. Kemp, reported seeing a huge sea creature near Chatham Island. Archie Wills, news editor of the Victoria Daily Times, asked readers to suggest a name. The winning entry combined Cadboro Bay with the Greek word for lizard, and it was soon shortened to Caddy.

Was a Cadborosaurus ever caught?

No Cadborosaurus specimen exists. In 1937 a strange carcass about four metres long was taken from a sperm whale’s stomach at Naden Harbour and photographed, but the remains were lost, and the museum director who saw samples called it an unborn baleen whale. A supposed baby Cadborosaurus caught and released in 1968 was probably a bay pipefish, according to a 2011 study.

Is Cadborosaurus a real animal?

Most scientists do not accept Cadborosaurus as a real animal. Edward Bousfield and Paul LeBlond named it Cadborosaurus willsi in 1995 and argued it was a living relative of the plesiosaurs, but they had only photographs and no specimen. Critics such as the palaeontologist Darren Naish say the sightings describe many different things and that the carcasses have all turned out to be known animals.

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